Ryan's Babe (2000)

It’s Canada Day weekend. It’s a time when the white majority of Canada celebrates how they conquered the territory, forcing the Indigenous peoples out of their homes. Most people seem to overlook that part when celebrating Canada, but that’s kind of what our country is and always has been. That’s not what this post is about though. This post is about a movie.

Seeing as it is Canada Day weekend, I thought it would be a good time to watch a Canadian movie. No, I didn’t watch Indian Horse. It’s a great movie about the residential school system and how utterly horrible that system was to Indigenous people as the church tried to wipe them out. But this is a blog about bad movies. I’m not going to use this blog to say that Indian Horse is an important movie and that everyone should watch it. I’m absolutely not going to say that because I’m not supposed to be discussing great movies. I’m going to write about a bad movie instead. A bad Canadian movie.

It might seem like a simple task to find a bad Canadian movie. Our film industry isn’t anything great. Well, we do have some shining spots. There are some diamonds in the rough. We’ve got some good documentaries, and we’ve got Indian Horse. We also have the work of Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. Mostly, though, we produce middle-of-the-road movies about how great Canada is, how beautiful Canada is, or hockey. Every once in a while, there’s a movie much, much worse. This is a post about one of those movies.

Ryan’s Babe came out in 2000 and was thought to be a lost Canadian film until recently. It has been heralded as the Canadian equivalent of The Room. I didn’t quite understand at first, but I learned as the movie progressed that it was an accurate description. It wasn’t on exactly the same level as The Room, since that movie kind of exists on its own plane. Ryan’s Babe certainly approaches that same level of bad, maybe even surpassing it at times. It’s an experience.

Connie (Alix Hayden) was obsessed with Ryan (Bill LeVasseur). She always had been. Yet Ryan was indifferent to her. She made advances, he didn’t care. It boiled over when Ryan brushed Connie off one too many times, and she attempted suicide. This sent Ryan on a road trip as he avoided the barrel of Connie’s father’s gun. Ryan got involved with gangsters, was almost castrated, befriended an escort, and started stripping. It was a wild ride that helped him learn there was no place like home.

I might have just made it sound like Ryan’s Babe was a modern Canadian version of The Wizard of Oz or something. It wasn’t that at all. Ryan’s Babe was more of a fever dream of run-on sentences. Something would happen and then something would happen and then something would happen. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. There seemed to be no reason to the chaotic story progressions. It felt like writer/director Ray Ramayya knew where he wanted to go with his main character, but didn’t know how to get there. Much like my writing style for many of these posts.

Ryan’s Babe began with a woman being sexually abused in the woods, only to escape her abuser and make it to the road. She pointed a gun at the first car she saw. It was Ryan’s car. She got in and they began what would normally be a quirky dark comedy. You know the kind. A criminal and an unknowing normal guy stuck together in a car. Contentious relationship slowly becomes a real friendship. They have a few laughs along the way. Eventually the bad guy shows up and they work together to win. Nah. Not this movie. Ryan took her to the airport, and she was out of the movie about twenty minutes in.

That twenty minutes gave enough time for a flashback. After Ryan peed on the side of the road while the woman watched, they stopped at a rest stop and Ryan told her how he got to where he was. Connie was obsessed with him from a young age. In college (he may have still been in college in the present, but I’m not sure on the time of the present in the movie), she kept trying to go on dates with Ryan, even though he always had girlfriends. A flashback within the flashback (why???) showed that when his bike was ruined as a child, she got him a new one. He rode off as soon as he got it, leaving her in the dust. Present day, he blew her off again. As retaliation, Connie decided to commit suicide. That would show Ryan. She simply ended up in the hospital. It did set off her drunk father, though, who drove off with a gun to find and kill Ryan. Ryan hit the road after Connie’s dad found him while he was peeing, and that was when the woman got in his car.

And it was here that a new, quickly thrown together segue was placed into the movie. Ryan dropped the woman off at the airport. As he left, he passed someone who looked just like him. Next thing you know, Ryan was kidnapped by a crime gang who mistook him for the rival gang’s leader’s son. The rival gang leader knew it wasn’t his son, though, and ordered his men to attack the other gang’s house, the same house Ryan was being held captive in. Ryan was being watched by a man nicknamed Shakespeare, who quoted Shakespeare while watching Ryan pee (I promise this is the last peeing time in the movie). Ryan came up with a plan to escape. He said he needed to poop. While pretending to poop, he jumped out the window, got in a garbage truck, and escaped. It was good timing, too. The rival gang passed the garbage truck on the way in and started shooting.

This whole time, there was stuff going on at home. Connie’s dad was still drunk and angry. Ryan’s mom was telling him to ease up a bit. Ryan hadn’t done anything. Connie hadn’t died. The doctor said it was because she hadn’t actually tried to kill herself. There were no drugs in her system when she apparently overdosed. Any cuts on her wrists weren’t deep enough to harm her. She had simply been trying to get attention, and it had worked. On everyone except Ryan, that was. Connie spent most of the movie brooding because Ryan was gone. She hadn’t brought him closer in near death. It pushed him away.

Anyway, Ryan hopped out of the garbage truck and hitched a ride with a trucker. The trucker had some sort of nefarious plan, since he drugged Ryan with a drink. He never followed through with the plan. Instead, he dropped Ryan off and told Ryan to walk a mile or something to a restaurant and talk to Mike. Somehow, Ryan got a job at the restaurant. Mike also gave Ryan a place to stay… In an abandoned strip mall. While working at the restaurant, Ryan was recognized by three women as their friend’s abuser. They snuck into Ryan’s strip mall apartment late at night and drug him. They threatened to cut off his penis. For some reason, they were dressed as high school cheerleaders, even though they were all in their thirties. At least. Their friend soon showed up and pointed out that Ryan was the wrong person. His hair was much longer than her abuser’s, and it had only been two days. The hair couldn’t have grown that much in that short amount of time. The four women decided to dump Ryan in the mountains.

Segue again. Ryan woke up and he was in Phoenix. That was a long way from Saskatchewan, where he started his journey. Things didn’t slow down at this point. Ryan ran into someone from Canada, who offered him a job at a resort. He got an apartment and settled down for the time being. Another tenant in the apartment building was an escort with a young daughter. Ryan befriended them, and it seemed like the escort could end up as the titular babe. Only, she wasn’t. She was being abused by her ex-husband. Ryan came home one day to find out the woman and her daughter were in the hospital. Her ex-husband had shown up. The police arrived and killed him in a gunfight. Ryan went to the hospital to visit, but I guess the movie didn’t have a hospital setting in the budget because he just showed up at a hotel room saying he got their message at the hospital. He comforted his escort friend, gave her $20,000 and hit the road for home.

Every transition between Ryan’s locations felt random. He bumped into his doppelganger at the airport and ended up in a gang feud. He escaped in a garbage truck, hitchhiked with a truck driver, got drugged, then got left on the side of the road to walk to a diner. Some women drugged him and decided to dump him in the mountains. Now he was ditching his friend in her greatest time of need, after she and her daughter watched her ex-husband die by police gunfire. Ryan’s Babe was all about those random segues from one sequence to the next.

They weren’t stopping there, either. Somehow, while trying to go northeast to get home to Saskatchewan, Ryan ended up to the west in Las Vegas. He went to a bar and began drinking. The bartender offered Ryan a job stripping for a bachelorette party. He accepted. After seeing a guy strip while performing karate, and another strip while disco dancing, Ryan stepped onto the stage. He took his clothes off, leaving on just a cowboy hat and some Canada flag boxers. He did some grinding against a ceiling beam. One of the women came onto the stage and poured shot after shot down Ryan’s throat until she had to carry him off the stage. Next thing Ryan knew, he was in the bed of the mother of a famous former football player. She essentially raped him before dying of a heart attack in that same bed while Ryan slept. He awoke, saw her corpse, and quickly peaced out of town.

There’s only a little bit left, and here’s where the worlds of Ryan and Connie connected back up. Connie’s dad realized his wrongs. Connie realized her wrongs. Ryan had dreamt of Connie at some point during the Phoenix stuff, which was what made him realize he should return home. I don’t know why he stopped in Las Vegas, especially since it was out of the way. When Ryan was about an hour out from his Saskatchewan town, he called home and talked to Connie. He said he was coming. She was happy. But he wouldn’t make it.

Ryan picked up one more hitchhiker on his way home. It was a blonde woman who claimed to be an aspiring actress. She was going to Vancouver to work in movies and television. There was a report on the radio about some criminals that looked like Ryan and this woman. A police car showed up. Ryan pulled over. The officer arrested Ryan while the woman waved and said she loved him. Ryan smiled at her. The credits rolled.

I don’t know what the point of Ryan’s Babe was. I don’t know if Connie was supposed to be the babe. Maybe the woman at the end was the babe. She certainly seemed to get Ryan arrested for no reason. Ryan didn’t learn anything through his journey. He just lived a life and didn’t grow. He built relationships that he cut at the drop of a hat. If anything, Ryan felt like he had some sort of emotional detachment. I don’t know the exact term for it because it seemed like he made the connections. They just didn’t matter to him. I don’t know. There was no arc to the character, though. There was no emotional journey.

Aside from the story, or lack thereof, there were a few other things about Ryan’s Babe that didn’t quite work. The audio was off through the entire movie. Doing a bit of research, I was able to confirm what I already thought from watching it. A good deal of the dialogue was rerecorded after the fact. That explained why the tones of characters’ voices didn’t always fit with the body language they were giving off. People didn’t sound as angry as they looked or didn’t look as angry as they sounded. Things like that. Add to the dissonance that a bunch of characters had heavy Canadian accents and it made things sound goofy, too. I’m Canadian and I find that heavy stereotypical accent goofy when people are supposed to be tough gang thugs. Imagine the line “I’m gonna rip your fuckin’ guts and shove them in your fuckin’ mouth.” with the Canadian accent. It makes me laugh thinking about it, and I’m sure that wasn’t the intention.

When I went searching for a Canadian movie to watch for this Canada Day weekend post, I settled on Ryan’s Babe because of its reputation. People compared it to The Room. The Room is a classic in bad movie circles. It’s one of those movies that built a reputation over the years as something special. Ryan’s Babe could become one of those movies. It was poorly made in what seemed like a sincere way. There were ridiculously over-the-top story beats like the three cheerleader women who threatened to cut off his penis and hang it above him so he would wake up and see what happened. There were some overly dramatic, overacting emotional moments. Connie’s drunk father was a solid example of that. Ryan’s Babe had everything needed to become a cult classic bad movie. The only problem was it was Canadian, so it didn’t get the same attention as other movies.

So, yes, I agree that Ryan’s Babe might be the Canandian equivalent of The Room. They were completely different movies. One of them was a relationship drama while the other was a darkly comedic road movie. But they shared a certain x-factor that made them a special sort of bad movie. There was a sincerity to everything that ran just below the surface. Tommy Wiseau and Ray Ramayya share a certain love for what they made. They brought heart and determination to their work. They just fell short when it came to filmmaking skills.

When Canada Day rolls around next year, I’d highly recommend giving Ryan’s Babe a watch. I mean, it’s not as good or nearly as important as Indian Horse, a great Canadian film, but it is an experience you will never forget. So is Indian Horse. Get a few friends together. Have your barbecue. Toss Ryan’s Babe on the ole back yard projector and have a good weekend. As for this weekend, I’m out. That’s the post. Have a good one, and I’ll see you next week!

Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. I’ve got some notes:

• I mentioned The Room (week 25) a few times, so here’s the post for that one.
• Have you seen Ryan’s Babe? If you haven’t, you should. If you have, what did you think? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter and hit me up there.
• You can also use Twitter or the comments to tell me what movies I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m open to any and all suggestions, though I might reject them if you say something like “You should cover Chinatown.” That’s a great movie. I shouldn’t cover it for a bad movie blog.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun. I promise to get back to using that frequently.
• I just double checked what I’ll be watching for next week’s post and groaned. It’s time to get around to another bigfoot movie. It’s been a few years since I checked out one of those and they’ve always been on the lower end of the Sunday “Bad” Movies spectrum. Anyway, it was a suggestion, so I tossed in into the schedule. I’ll be checking out Bigfoot vs. Megalodon. Let’s hope this goes well. See you in a week!